With the development of technology, the resolution of a display panel is higher and higher. That is, the number of pixels in the unit area is increasing, which requires that size of each sub-pixel is becoming smaller and smaller. However, due to process constraints, apparently, the size of each sub-pixel cannot be decreased unlimitedly.
In order to improve the display effect under a given size of the sub-pixel, a display device in the Pentile mode is proposed. In the display device in the Pentile mode, sub-pixels of certain colors (such as red sub-pixels and blue sub-pixels) are decreased in number while sub-pixels of different colors in the display device are virtually considered to be in different “layers”, and each layer is divided into a plurality of sampling regions, sampling regions in different layers are divided so that they are not overlapped with each other, and then content to be displayed by each sub-pixel is calculated by area ratio of the sampling regions. A part of sub-pixels in the display device in the Pentile mode are shared, so that the visual resolution is higher than the actual physical resolution. That is to say, compared to a conventional display panel, the display panel in the Pentile mode may have more pixel units formed thereon. However, as understood by persons skilled in the art, each pixel unit requires to be driven by one pixel circuit, and due to the limitation on the size of the display panel, although more pixel units may be fabricated, there is no way to fabricate more pixel circuits accordingly, thus it is still very difficult to fabricate a high resolution display panel.